LMS Support: Train Your Staff The Right Way!

Implementing a new LMS in your school or organization should centrally support the staff into new environment. Doing this the right way may include facilitating workshops and demonstrations, drop-in sessions and on request training. Further it will require online information with a help desk. Despite of the training efforts you make to minimize the reaction to change, often staff with less tech knowledge are left out. Overcoming these drawbacks can help you save costs on training as well as optimizing the full learning management systems.

Spending thousands of dollars on a centrally supported Learning Management System without proper staff training may go into drain end up a disaster experiment. Making the staff realize the benefits of LMS to manage lecture resources, training notes, manage interactive course materials and wide range of activities is quite important. Most of the staff don’t realize the full potential that can be scaled upwards using a LMS to work or study within groups. If properly setup, the students can download course materials, upload assignments, and contribute to online discussions. Furthermore students can store and organize materials for self-learning, and also manage drafts of essays, assignments and projects. Having asynchronous LMS, with self-directed learning will place your school or organization in perfect position.

Apart from the support resources you provide your staff using the LMS, the staff needs to be familiarized with your Learning Environment. The following LMS Support Tips will help you train your staff the right way…

5 LMS Support Tips To Train Your Staff The Right Way

Benefits of teaching with the LMSLMS training should be part of your organizations professional development programs and seminars to promote high quality teaching and learning. Information about subject design and setting up new LMS courses needs to be discussed in details. With online learning, content and copyrights of intellectual materials is a real concern, staff should be made aware of these circumstances.Benefits of online assessments, options of communication and collaboration need to be explored carefully in staff training. Further information on user management, guests and external users need to be mentioned. It’s always a good practice to have guides explaining the LMS features.

Facilitating workshops and eventsCalendar of training opportunities for staff, and links to self-help guides will help the staff to learn in iterations and increase their knowledge. Workshops based on LMS Tests and Surveys, LMS Essentials, LMS Assignment and Feedback, LMS Grades, LMS Blogs & Wikis. The regular series of workshops really help your staff to optimize the full advantage of LMS. Workshops conducted as Lunch Time events often get a great deal of attention.

Explaining the LMS accessibilityNot everyone is lucky enough to access the educational technology as is. You need to focus in LMS accessibility for staff and students with special needs. Often liaising with special needs unit will be able to improve your access to the LMS having a consultation to discuss your access requirements and your subject choice.

Known Issues with the LMS & maintenance outagesExplaining the limitations of your LMS can help you to a great extent. Gradebook issues or cohort issues, recording them and keep track of the issues raised by the staff can help you have a log which helps you further in scoping and planning training sessions and workshops. Sending an outage email to the students and staff is the most annoying thing, however having a scheduled outage with update information can relax their nerves. It is very important that the staff is trained to allow for any planned system or technical updates to LMS.

Tuning the browser settingsMost users of LMS are unaware of the fact that their browsers need to be adjusted. The proper functioning of LMS is dependent on the browser capabilities. The staff needs to be aware of their browser setting for using LMS. Having a test page for performing numerous tests to help the staff assess browser’s suitability for LMS will make the life easy of LMS support staff.